The Red House (21 page)

A torrent after winter rains but quiet now, central shallows and the banks hidden under chestnut, hazel and sycamore. Pontvaen. The salmon catch a fraction of what it once was (a fifty-one-pounder at Bigsweir in ’62 but less than a thousand every season now). Otters and pine martens. Pipistrelle and Noctule bats sleeping in ancient beeches. Cabalva Stud (Cabalva Sorcerer, 1995, £3,000, honest, eager to please, big scopy jump). The ghosts of Bill Clinton and Queen Noor. Flat stones down the center of the river so that if the level were just right you could skip across the water like Puck (Richard and Dominic run aground twice). The Black Mountains a smoky blue in the day’s haze. Rhydspence. A moss-greened hull upended against a tiny shed. The five arches of the toll bridge at Whitney-on-Wye. White railings at the top, twice washed away and rebuilt. Ten pence for motorbikes,
fifty pence for cars. Inexplicably, the sound of a flute from somewhere nearby. The church of Saints Peter and Paul. The Boat Inn. Scampi, shepherd’s pie …

Dominic looked at the map. There was a road half a mile away. It seemed impossible. The swill and chatter of water, those little birds darting in and out of the greenery, overhanging the banks. How many more worlds were hiding round the corner and over the hill? He remembered the big ash on the waste ground behind the junior school, climbing up into that plump crook where the trunk split, sitting there for hours with a Wagon Wheel and a Fanta, the world going about its business below.

Up at the prow Richard had fallen into a steady rhythm that calmed him somewhat, bears in cages and so forth, though people lived entire lives with this level of anxiety, not even pathological, just part of the human condition. Alex was up ahead quite clearly reveling in his superior maritime skills.
Sweet Thames run softly till I end my song … With falling oars they kept the time …
Of course the one thing he missed since marrying Louisa was that solitary hour each day, a place of comfort and safety in which he returned to himself, Monteverdi or Bach in the background usually, turning over the day’s events in his mind, or more often thinking absolutely nothing. He wished he had kept the flat or bought himself a smaller one nearer the hospital, though the former would have been wasteful and the latter an insult to Louisa. Nor would she have understood. She liked company, she liked noise, she liked knowing someone else was in the house. He turned and smiled at her and she returned something that was neither quite a smile nor a scowl.

Louisa turned to Dominic.
My go
.

The boat swayed precipitously as they swapped positions. She sat on the little bench in the bow. This was more like it. Bows and arrows and dens and scrumping, the childhood she once dreamed of having, like Richard’s childhood, except not like Richard’s because his childhood
wasn’t like that, was it, as she regularly had to remind herself.
Incidentally …

What?
said Dominic.

Last night
. She wouldn’t mention the cereal or the sleepwalking or the turning out of the kitchen light.
She said something about Karen. A baby called Karen. Your daughter
. Was
baby
the right word? Was
daughter
the right word?

She’s having a rather difficult time
, said Dominic.

But this was eighteen years ago
.

I’m afraid so
.

Something dismissive about his tone, and for the first time since they had arrived she felt a kind of sisterhood with Angela. Men are from Mars. All that stuff. She’d come on holiday expecting to be a spectator, to cook and help out and be good company while Richard got to know his family. But they were her family too, weren’t they, in the same way that Melissa was his family. Somehow she had never seen it this way.

There’s a dead fish
, shouted Benjy excitedly. They waited and, sure enough, it floated past, huge and silvered, milky eye skyward.

Overhearing their conversation, Richard realized too late why Angela had asked him about stillborn children. He felt bad for not having pressed her further, and with this guilt came a longing for that armchair, the solitude, the empty mind.

What Angela finds is not
My Name Is David
or
The Log of the Ark
but
The Knights of King Arthur
, a book her mother had been given when she was a child and which she in turn gave to Angela when Angela was eight or nine. The memory is so strong that when she finds the words
To Kathleen from Pam, Christmas 1941
written in crabbed fountain pen on the endpaper she feels a sense of real grievance and trespass. Forty pence. She’ll buy it and read it as a kind of penance.

Scampi, shepherd’s pie, a stuffed pike in a glass case, polished copper bed warmers.

You should try it sometime
, said Alex.
Waking up under canvas
.

If you built a log fire and gave me a bottle of whisky, maybe
, said Louisa.
And some very thick socks
.

So
, said Dominic,
where would we end up if we just carried on paddling?

Hospital
, said Alex.

Richard could see that he was flirting with Louisa, but he had no idea how to stop it without causing grave offense, possibly to everyone around the table. He held up a spoonful of crumble.
This is surprisingly good
. His marriage to Jennifer had been a contract with explicit and renegotiable terms. He was belatedly realizing how uncommon this was. There was an art to marriage, which depended not just on skills and rules but something more nebulous. That image of the gull and his father laughing. Why did it trouble him so much?

The path was not as clear on the ground as it was on the map, the mud was surprisingly deep in places and Melissa wasn’t really getting into the countryside thing after all.
I am going to get an apartment in Chelsea and the only time I am ever going to look at a field is from the window of a fucking plane
.

They crossed the little stream and worked their way up the hill and were nearly at the road when Melissa slipped and span and landed on her arse with such perfect comedy timing that Daisy laughed out loud. She offered Melissa her hand but Melissa grabbed it and yanked and Daisy yelped and found herself lying on her back next to Melissa staring into a canopy of horse chestnut leaves with damp seeping into her knickers. She imagined grabbing Melissa and rolling over, wrestling, like she might have done with Benjy.

Sod this for a game of soldiers. I’m heading back
.

Ten more minutes
. Daisy got to her feet.
We’re nearly there
.

I need a hot shower
.

Come on
, said Daisy,
you can cope with a wet arse
. She began walking up to the fence and when she opened the gate onto the road she turned briefly and saw that Melissa was following and it gave her a pleasure she hadn’t felt all week.

Queen Guinevere lay idly in bed dreaming beautiful dreams. The sunny morning hours were slipping away, but she was so happy in dreamland that she did not remember that her little maid had called her long ago
.

But the queen’s dreams came to an end at last, and all at once she remembered that this was the morning she had promised to go to the hunt with King Arthur
.

He walked to the edge of the car park to listen to Amy’s message.
Dom. It’s me
. She was crying.
I’m really sorry. I know I said I wouldn’t ring but Andrew’s been taken into hospital with pneumonia and I’m frightened, Dom. If you get a chance, can you ring me, please?

Episode thirty-nine of the Mother and Son show. He deleted the message. The truth was that she disgusted him, something moist and wretched about her, a child at forty-two. He couldn’t remember her once expressing real unadulterated joy, only that desperate hunger when they made love
(fill me up … push it right inside me …)
which was thrilling at first but which now sounded like a need to be crushed out or used up. If it wasn’t him it would be someone else. Deep down she wanted things to go wrong. If she was happy she would have to face up to all those things she hadn’t done, the law degree, the second child, New Zealand, those precious hypothetical ambitions stolen from her by a string of bad men. He loved his family. Why had he risked losing them for this?

He heard a rumbling clang and turned to see Mike’s Transit coming into the pub car park, the trailer bouncing and yawing behind it. He turned the phone off and slipped it into his back pocket.

Angela assumed at first that her mother had started drinking again, the dirt and clutter, the mood swings, but there were no bottles and no alcohol on her breath. She might have realized earlier but their conversations had never been intimate and you didn’t ask someone to name their grandchildren or do their five-times table as her GP finally did that freakish Saturday morning, the cloud so low and thick it felt like an eclipse. She expected him to set in train some boilerplate process, health visitor, social worker, nursing assistant, leading gradually toward residential care, but they stepped out into a biblical downpour with nothing more than an invitation to return when things got worse, and in two hours her mother’s terrified incomprehension had become a vicious anger at everyone who was trying to interfere in her life, Angela, the doctor, the neighbors.

She rang Richard who said there was nothing they could do. Something would happen, an accident, a stroke, something financial, something legal, and the decision would be taken out of their hands. She thought,
You selfish bastard
, but he was right. An icy pavement outside Sainsbury’s. Lucy at school said she should sue and Angela laughed and said,
I should pay them
. Hospital threw her mother completely.
Who are all these people?
Her mind held together only by the scaffolding of a familiar house and a routine she had followed for ten years. Two weeks later she was in Meadowfields.
Beckett meets Bosch
, said Dominic, and it was true, there really was screaming every time they visited. A couple of months later she was transferred to Acorn House. Grassy quadrangle, actual menu, two lounges, one without television. The previous occupant of her room had left a framed photograph of a cocker spaniel on the bedside table. Mum was insistent that it had been their dog who had recently passed away, though they had never had a dog and she was never quite able to remember its name.

They crossed the little car park and began climbing the Cat’s Back, a rising ridge of grass and gorse and mud. Sweaty now, Melissa had tied her shirt and Puffa jacket around her waist and was walking in a blue vest, her freckled shoulders bare. Daisy was embarrassed to find herself in second place.
You do secret sport, don’t you
.

Hockey
. Melissa’s enjoyment had caught her by surprise. Middle-aged people did this stuff, but she felt like a kid again. The mud, the effort, Daisy’s uncomplicated company, except that she’d never been that kid, had she, because Mum needed counseling if you spilt coffee on the carpet. Hence Dad fucking off, possibly.